


A Sacrifice Upon The Altar

by Valmouth



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Dubious Consent, F/M, King Under the Mountain, Political Marriage, Post-BOFA, marriage of alliance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-14
Updated: 2014-04-14
Packaged: 2018-01-18 19:46:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1440562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valmouth/pseuds/Valmouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The spirit of a contract is like the spirit of an alliance – a wish to strengthen ties between all parties for a purpose. It comes to him in the third year that there is another way to strengthen those ties.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Sacrifice Upon The Altar

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer : I own no rights to these characters or to the creative universes they are derived from. I mean no offence by posting this and make no money from it.
> 
> A/N : From a prompt on the hobbit kink meme, though somewhat misfired for the terms of the prompt, since this is post-BoFA - "Some of the Battle of 5 Armies can be averted by diplomacy and strategic marriage pacts - by marrying the King under the Mountain to the daughter of the new king of Dale, for instance. The arrangement is more than slightly awkward."

Smaug teaches him that alliances are all too easily broken.

When Erebor fell, the elves turned away from the dwarves, the dwarves turned away from the men, and Thorin has dangled his burglar from the battlements of his ruined city for the sake of a jewel. A jewel of kingship, certainly, with the fate of his entire race incumbent upon it, but still just a stone.

His greed has had its consequences, at least one for unexpected good. Had he never antagonised the Men and Elves, had he never brought them to arms, had he never sent for Dain for reinforcements, Erebor too would be as Khazad-dum - lost to the orcs and the goblins. And he is not the only one whose greed has born fruit. Had the Elvenking not lusted for his white gems, his army would not have left the forest, prepared and willing for war.

Actions have consequences. The consequences of his greed is the death and destruction he brings to the East. The consequence of his pride is the kingdom he returns to his people.

Bilbo has forgiven him since then. 

Bard forgives as well, though he cannot forget.

In his turn he cannot forgive Thranduil, nor forget, but he can call a truce.

He lives to ascend the throne and he is older now. The world has changed irreparably in the East. Nothing is as it was when he was young and the darkness in Mirkwood still haunts him in the quiet hours before dawn. The violence of orcs and goblins has followed him, even here where he remembers relative safety except for that fateful day when the hurricane of Smaug’s wings beat down on them in warning.

He sees all too late the thin threads and cogs of Gandalf’s machinations. He sees now why Erebor could not be left vanquished, and why the exiled dwarves could not simply live out their lives in helpless peace.

He is angry for some days after his realisation at being so used but in the end he has no energy to keep grievances. There is too much work to do; too much that depends upon him. And Gandalf is a powerful ally, even if Thorin now learns that his bloodline, his tragedy, his legacy, were nothing so much as levers to be pulled to create a foot soldier out of him in a wizard’s war against a far more deadly enemy.

Either way he is once again returned to Erebor. Once again his family rules with complete assurance beneath the Mountain. Once again the dwarves will be great.

He promises this, but the work to be done to ensure it is almost terrifying in its complexity. He has never truly had to rule. Lead, yes, but never rule. And there is no enemy here within his own gates, and no right or wrong that he will see until the consequences of his decisions have magnified over the course of centuries.

His first order of business is to set Erebor to rights. By way of reparation, he allows this work to be done in conjunction with the town of Dale.

Bard takes his share of the treasure but Laketown has no builders, smiths and masons the like of which were seen in the days of Girion. Of the few practitioners they have, all are used to plain work and are ground down by lack of resources and lack of training. They have no pride in their craft. There are few enough dwarves who arrive with better skill but there are some, and there is plenty of labour.

Spring is harsh and summer is brutal. Autumn is dangerous and winter is deadly. But they all survive.

The elves bring resources of what food they have, and guard against the orc packs that torment the town. They have healers and woodworkers and when the chill of autumn gives way to winter, it is Thranduil who sends hearthfire wood without prompting. When the first year is done, and the workshops open, the elves bring a shipwright, one of their own kind, who begins to draft plans on the recreation of the old trade ships that once sailed the harbours of Laketown in droves.

To aid in all of this, Thranduil’s son Legolas oversees the establishment of simple but effective communication channels, a horn signal to summon help from any point of the triangle they create with dwarves and men.

Still, Thorin watches these efforts with both grudging acceptance and wary disbelief. For the elves were still the race to turn away when dwarves needed help. Elves were still the race who declared war on the Lonely Mountain when Smaug was dead, and proudly demanded treasure when they should have sued diplomatically for a gift of it.

He has his truce with the elves, but alliances are fragile and all too easily broken.

He does not need Thranduil to remind him of Thror’s insults and escalating hostilities prior to Smaug’s invasion. An alliance to a dwarf is a contract, and contracts to a dwarf are sacred. He has always known that the contract was broken before ever Thranduil turned away from them, and yes, contracts have loopholes and can be used to ill. 

But the spirit of a contract is like the spirit of an alliance – a wish to strengthen ties between all parties. It comes to him in the third year that there is another way to strengthen those ties.

It comes to him, in fact, when Kili asks formally for permission to marry his she-elf.

Thorin studies his sister-son in the firelight, noting the growth of his beard and the thickening lines of his body.

He doesn’t like elves, but he is willing to excuse that particular aspect of Tauriel’s being. She is a fierce warrior, a being of good sense and sympathetic heart, and she has saved his nephews more times than he likes to admit. Kili loves her dearly and to forbid his permission will do no good; Kili will simply take her as wife and move beyond the reach of the mountain.

Besides, there are advantages to Tauriel. She has Thranduil’s ear still, even disgraced as she is, and of Legolas, Thranduil’s heir and military commander. She negotiates for Erebor already with the court of the Elvenking, and brings them news of the darkness she sees when she spends her spring and summer in the forests.

A marriage under Dwarven law is also little more than a contract, which, he notes, by definition can be an alliance.  The elves have already shown that their pride will not stand to see one of their own kind endangered.

He gives his permission on the understanding that Kili will still call the Lonely Mountain his home. It is necessary to ensure that the alliance works to his advantage.

In the end it is easy to tie the elves to a contract.

The men are not so easy.

Fili has found a dwarf woman to love. She is not well born but she is well enough, and she makes his graceless heir happy. She does not try to entangle herself in the politics of the king, and shows respect to the duties of the crown prince. All these traits are worthy, and when Thorin catches her meekness turned to fury over Fili’s strutting arrogance, he smiles to himself at the thought that she may be a reasonable queen one day.

He considers others of his immediate family but where once he would have had a brother to offer, he has only his sister.

Dis refuses his petition. She despises it, and tells him no good will come of treating people as pawns.

Thorin, who has been used and manipulated and done so in his own turn, has no such qualms. But he does remember the happiness Dis had with her husband, and for that alone he does not ask again. In truth he is glad. Dwarves protect their women jealously, and he prefers on the whole to keep his sister safe in the mountain and under his protection where she belongs.

That leaves him with close advisers and favoured friends. He considers Balin, who will be kind and understanding. All the members of his Company are heroes in their own right, for all their brash ways and common trades.

He rules out Gloin and Bombur, whose wives are happy and settled already in the Mountain. He rules out Dwalin, who is driven by his warfare and violence. He is fiercely loyal to his shield brother but he has no illusions as to Dwalin's nature. He rules out the Brothers Ri, who have forsaken their fame and retreated to less elevated professions. Oin is old and deaf, Bifur is injured and unlikely to be made well after so many years. Bofur has the nature that Thorin would prefer to offer but very like the Brothers Ri, Bofur has retreated back to his mines. The mines of Erebor are no safe place as it stands, and the work is long for little pay.

He does no favours giving a high-born woman into such a household.

He considers Dain's offspring, but the alliiance is required to be with Erebor and not the Iron Hills. In time, he thinks, he will need to strengthen the thin threads that connect him to the other dwarf settlements as well. But for now his ambition spreads only to the town at the foothills of his mountain, who he trusts to protect him kingdom and who failed to do so when the dragon came.

He wonders if instead there is one amongst his people that such a woman might choose. A love match, such as it has been with Kili and Tauriel, is likely to bear more fruit than a political one.

He takes this scheme to Bard, who stares at him as though he has gone mad again and refuses the idea entirely.

Bard is passionate and idealistic. He says out loud that he will not ask such things of his people.

Thorin simply asks him to clarify if his distaste of the situation is because it is a marriage of convenience, which is common enough still among both their kin, or because one of the choices will be a dwarf.

Bard has no reply to that that could be anything other than insulting to the King Under The Mountain.

Erebor is necessary to peace in the East. Thorin knows that, and values it in the lives Gandalf was willing to expend just to see it returned to its rightful people. He also knows that alliances break too easily when true danger is at hand. This much is true for any one of them. The elves turned away from the dwarves, the dwarves turned away from the men, and it is the men whose town sits openly in the trough of the Lonely Mountain. It is the men who are drawn into feuds and negotiations, who are asked to fight in wars they never began in the first place.

It does not take much to remind Bard of this fact. And of the fact that it is Elvish ships they sail for trade while Dwarvish craftsmen sell their wares in the marketplace.

By the time he leaves the meeting, Bard is slumped tiredly at the table, his elbows on the scrubbed wood and his head in his hands.

Thorin has no sympathy to spare for such gentle feelings. There is still much work to be done, and many that depend upon him to do it. The right or wrong of his decisions will be made known in the centuries to come and all he can do is make his choices in the present the best way he can.

He is not expecting to be the choice.

Bard’s oldest daughter is eighteen, new to adulthood by the standards of her people and still a child by the standards of his. He is two hundred, and feels five hundred on some days.

He rejects the decision and advises Bard to choose again.

She speaks this time, and says in her low voice that it is not her father who asks her to choose, and not her father who makes her choice.

Sigrid is the eldest daughter of the King of Dale, for all that Dale is not yet the prosperous town it once was. Bard’s son, Bain, may be his heir, but Thorin knows too well the importance of continuing a bloodline through the women of the family. His own heirs are his sister’s sons.

He looks to Bard to end this nonsense but the King of Dale is hollow-eyed and tight-jawed.

He asks, as courteously as he can, if this is in some way supposed to be offend him into withdrawing his offer.

Sigrid flushes red but she is equally polite when she replies that she hopes the King Under The Mountain did not mean to say that betrothal to her is offensive. Thorin has the grace to apologise for such an impression, and she smiles at him.

She curtseys and smiles and leaves her reluctant father to discuss her marriage with her prospective and even reluctant bridegroom.

This is an unforeseen complication.

Thorin wonders momentarily if the girl has taken some fancy to his reputation or his heroic deeds but he dismisses it in the next instance. Sigrid does not lean towards him or hold herself where she can catch his attention. Her gaze was cool and impersonal and when she leaves the room, she does it without a backward glance.

A Queen’s gaze.

It surprises him that Bard would offer his eldest child to a scheme he dislikes so intensely but she is a worthy selection from the side of men. For himself, he tries one more time to change her choice.

Bard is angry. Enraged even. He is furious that he has been forced to offer his daughter as a sacrifice, and his knuckles are white where he clenches his fist on the table. Yet he repeats only that she made her own choice, and that if Thorin wants to see this scheme through to the end, her choice will be respected and accepted or else the Men of the East will consider this a slight to their honour.

Thorin does not appreciate the threat, but on reflection he understands it.

He is pragmatic in these days, and tries to be wiser as a king than he was as a leader.

He accepts the choice and looks away politely while Bard swallows against the knot of grief in his throat.

Dis has less restraint. She tries to appeal for an end to this insanity, and when coaxing and reason have no effect, she loses her temper. It is the first and only time in their lives that she tries to strike her brother. Even as he catches her arm in a bruising grip before the blow can land, he knows that she regrets it. That she realises with terrible certainty that any chance she may have had to change his mind has now been lost.

It is a scandal.

Balin points out quietly that the girl is very young. Dwalin is more forthright, and tells him it is wrong. Fili and Kili say nothing beyond weak congratulations with troubled smiles, and Thorin knows that this decision makes him a figure of fun in the mines and the workshops, where ditties of April and October start to circulate.

It is far closer to April and December but he turns a blind eye to what he cannot change and steels himself to meet formalities with equanimity. It will be soon, for they are not bound by the interruption of travel between forest and mountain. Dale lies a few hours’ ride from the gates of Erebor, and once the decision is made, Thorin sees no reason not to act on it.

He gives her a gift to seal the betrothal, and allocates a year in which she may comfortably change her mind.

She is stiff and unbending when she accepts the gift, and her hand is cold when he slides the ring into her finger. He has chosen the sapphire for the colour that becomes them both so well, but she regards it with an absent eye that doesn’t seem to notice the richness of it.

It is not his concern, he supposes. The wedding is to a purpose, and her tolerance and obedience is all that he asks for.

How she spends the year, he does not know. It is late summer when he puts the ring on her finger, and with autumn and winter so close, his days are spent preparing his foundling kingdom for the months ahead. He assumes Bard and his eldest daughter do the same.

He sees her in passing at the feast on Durin’s Day, which he has designated a day of celebration for the return of the dwarves and the death of the dragon. She is regal in a decidedly elvish gown of blue, and she smiles only when a soldier from the Greenwood that he does not recognise speaks quietly to her beneath cover of the noise.

He searches himself for jealousy but there is none, bar the distaste at having what is his fawned over by an elf.   

Still, she does not disgrace her father or him, and he speaks a few words to her before he is called away to deal with a minor inconvenience.

He sees Fili speak with her as well, but she does not smile at him either, and his heir is uncharacteristically sombre for such a day of celebration.

Autumn and winter pass, and give him time to prepare for his new queen’s arrival. He suspects this will work very much as Tauriel has constructed her alliance – to be shared between the forest and the mountain. He has no issue with Sigrid returning to Dale during the summer and spring, where she will be of some use to her father and her people. She can return from the town at any time they wish, should it be needed. During winter and autumn, of course, he will insist on her attendance in Erebor.

As such she requires chambers.

He has his seneschal organise appropriate furniture for such apartments.

Balin broaches the tricky dilemma of offspring.

Thorin raises his eyebrows.

He asks bluntly what sort of offspring Balin can expect from a human and a dwarf, particularly if neither anticipate coupling.

Balin is silent before quietly opening a tome that rests beside his left elbow. It is an old one, and its binding shows that it is not from the library of the Lonely Mountain. Its leather cover is badly cracked and damaged, and its pages are thin and delicate.

It is, as he discovers, regarding the lore of Men.

The page Balin silently points him to defines marriage, and allows for separation if the marriage is unconsummated.

It is a setback, and a possible loophole. His mouth pulls down at the corners but he has come this far and he will not see his alliance fall through because he could not stomach a night of exertion. As for the girl, he hopes blackly that she will be prepared to receive a dwarf in her bed on her wedding night, for that is what she will get.

Spring arrives with the melting of the snow, and the first buds on tiny bushes with white, odourless flowers. Spring arrives with a summons from the King of Dale, to discuss the wedding of his eldest daughter to the King Under The Mountain.

Thorin is a figure of fun for his young human bride, but the humour dies on the summer’s day that she arrives in her wedding gown.

She wears blue again but someone has taken care to ensure that she is not in elvish fashion this time. The sapphire ring catches the light and her bearing is proud. But her face is pale, and her eyes are over-bright. 

Thorin knows that her fingers quake when he takes them in his hand.

The ceremony itself is nothing more than a blessing and an exchange of vows. In the Ered Luin, Dis completed the ceremony alone with her husband in the hovel she called a home. Here in the Lonely Mountain, Thorin cannot have such privacy. His ceremony is pomp and splendour – richness and power.

Here, a Princess of Dale marries the King of Erebor, and there should be much to rejoice about in such a fact.

When it is over, he takes her to where they can be more private.

He is not heartless, nor is he a monster. He understands what it is he has asked of her and is determined to give as much himself. They will do this, because it is for the good of their people. For the good of all people in the Rhovanian.

He explains all that, quietly and with gentleness he doesn’t often show, in the room he calls his sanctuary.

It has no windows, as all rooms so far into the Mountain don’t, and it has only a single thick wooden door with heavy metal fastenings. By torchlight she seems even paler than before, and perched in the sturdy wooden chair she seems suddenly small.

She is only eighteen, and like her father, he suspects she was never raised with the expectation of one day being responsible for the lives of so many.

Still, he cannot help her now. She had her choice to stop it over the course of a year in which he would have listened – could have listened – and waited for her to realise that pride was one thing but sacrifice was another.

She has said nothing, and sacrificed instead, and so he cannot save her or himself from a choice she has made with all consciousness.

He gives her wine – which is another ritual, though she does not know it – and tells her calmly about the things he will show her and the tutoring in his customs that she will receive. She is quiet and still, and sips her wine only once before she simply grips the cup.

When they emerge from the room, Tauriel takes her to eat something, smiling kindly as she is wont to do.

Kili watches her go, standing beside his uncle and his king, and only Kili has the grace to say he could still end this.

Thorin knows he cannot. The time for speech and debate has passed. He brushes Kili aside and goes to find Dwalin, who had the courage to speak plainly when everyone else turned away.

Alliances even among friends, he thinks tiredly, cannot always be strong enough.

Oin catches his eye and nods slightly, and Thorin is reassured now that a certain vial will be presented to Sigrid when she is made ready in her room that night. It will be bitter, most likely, because all Oin’s potions are bitter, but it will protect her womb from any… untoward accidents.

He is very clear on this – there will be no heir from her body, certainly none from his bloodline. Fili is his heir, and he needs no other.

As for offspring, he is too old to consider raising a child now. Too old, and too busy.

Besides which, Fili is betrothed to his dwarf woman, and so the continuation of their line will be assured. What Kili and his Tauriel intend to do about children is a discussion Thorin prefers not to have. He cannot contemplate a half-elven child as King Under The Mountain. That also was the condition upon which Kili was allowed his marriage.

It is the condition upon which he has allowed his own. Sigrid will not birth any dwarf kings. If all goes as it should, she will birth no one.

He has no jealousy on her behalf, but as his wife and the queen of his kingdom, she is his. He will not suffer anyone else to have her while he is still alive and able to protect his own.

The evening draws to its inevitable close sooner than he likes. He has steeled himself to this end for months, and Balin turns away when he rises from his place at the feasting table.

Sigrid has gone before him, and of those who are close to the throne, they know what is to come next. None of them like it. He likes it as little as they do. But they are soft-hearted, and he cannot afford to be.

She is waiting for him when he arrives, standing and still with her enormous eyes wide with fright.

He sees her suddenly as she is – a child, barely on the cusp of womanhood, struggling with all the ills of her new rank as well as the wide world of adults. Trapped in stone she has never grown up in, away from sunlight and rain alike, in a world where she does not understand the customs or the history.

The dwarves of Erebor were gone before her father’s father was born. The King Under The Mountain is a face in a tapestry from the past.

Her fear is so palpable he can almost smell it, can almost taste it sour and acidic at the back of his throat.

She asks him just once not to do this, to give her one day, just one, to prepare herself.

He is no monster but he asks her if it will be easier tomorrow, or the next day, or if she can guarantee him that she will not feel the same fear then. He reminds her that she made her choice, and she trembles so hard he can see it.

But she does not cry. At least, she does not wail. Her eyes are over-bright but her tears do not fall until after he has laid her on the bed, hitched up her nightrobe and unlaced the neck.

Dwarves love only once in their lives but they are not precluded from sex without love, as elves are, and so he has some small experience with physical pleasure.

She clearly has none. She is obedient and submissive, but she does not know how to help him make this easier for herself. And she is taller than he is, which frustrates him as he is forced to consider logistics instead of simple caresses.

She spreads her legs because he pushes them apart, and bites back a sound when he touches his fingers to the very core of her.

He is as careful as he knows how to be. But he is also not her lover. He is here because there is no other way, and because he will not tolerate loopholes. He takes her virginity because that is what Men expect and then he spends himself in her to begin the terms of the contract.

Her tears only fall when he is done, and rises from her flesh to leave the bed.

He pulls his trousers to rights and smooths down the tunic he has neglected to remove.

She has already rolled over and huddled into herself, her gown pulled down hastily to hide her shame and her distress.

There is blood on the sheets.

He feels his stomach twist, the bile rise into his throat. He has never wanted to hurt her, and the things he must do as king are sometimes unpalatable.

He does her the courtesy of not subjecting her to more of his presence than he can help. He has done the worst he can do, now, and it is over. They must simply try to make peace with it.

He leaves but signals the human woman who has attended her to go back inside. He is open about Sigrid’s grief, and asks only that the woman care for her. In the circumstances, the woman’s thinly veiled spite is expected and he does not hide from it.

When he has reached his chambers he undresses. He sets his clothing and jewellery aside. He washes his hands and face and between his legs. And then he retches, quietly and calmly, into a basin left for just such instances.

He calls to have the water and basin removed, and then goes to bed.

His Queen will need to be shown her new role in the morning.  

 


End file.
